AN E-TERVIEW WITH DOLL YOKO

Q: Is digiflesh erotics different from previous forms of flesh-to-flesh contact--or does it still carry strains of our sexual histories? Are we now driven by our viral fears to seek electronic whips and chains to open the possibilities of new zones of imaginary frenzies, e-mail orgies, and beyond?

A: Communications technologies are enabling an expansion of the pyscho-sexual imaginal landscape, maybe almost in a regressive way. A return to 'let's pretend' games, 'show me your pixels, your data, your fantasies ... and I'll show you mine.'

"If the play is good enough I will brand my textual body with your yearnings, for all to enjoy. There is anonymity but no privacy."

" But all of this is premature. I take my games seriously, devote many hours to them. And so hesitate as I sense this new mind quivering curiously under my fingertips."

"The responsibility of imaginations peeled slowly to their infinite cores sits uneasily with my anarchic impulse."

"I am open to being convinced."

A: Relations become extremely intense inhabiting one's waking and dreaming thoughts. Like love I suppose. The trading of infantile dirty little secrets, the illusion of power that one has in serious games, the bleeding of so-called VL (Virtual Life) into RL (Real Life), the destruction of boundaries, the paradox of losing one's sense of the body at the same time one is in this constant process of becoming a more eroticised body, acquiring a datastream cock and fucking boys up the ass or blood sharing leso vampyric practices, or a boy shrinking to the size of a doll and being shoved up a chick's cunt. It's kinda like sex in the confessional. All seems possible except kissing. Nothing can replace a damn good pash (aussie for suck face). Yet. Not that I want it to, either. I am addicted to kissing more than I am to my online games.

There are no rules in this zone.

The rules are simple.

Anonymity. Honesty. Trust. Beguilement. Imagination.

Q: Digital bifurcations have constructed spaces of invention and emergence as zones of erotic autonomy as eccess/excess. Your work with VNS Matrix has brought together a number of women who are playing within this arena-- how did this coagulation happen?

A: Each member of VNS Matrix would answer this question differently. This is my version of the truth . . . Like all good coagulating stories it starts with slime, and maybe ends with blood. I live on the edge of the Australian desert in a small town of lies and whispers with a palpable palpitating underbelly (apocryphal maybe, but in the early 80s Salman Rushdie supposedly commented that Adelaide was the most malevolent city he had ever visited). It was the summer of 91. Definitely not the summer of love. We were four girls. We were hot and bored and poor (for me not much has changed, except I am no longer bored). We decided to try and crack the porn cartel with some chick porn. We made some images on stolen computers, Beg, Bitch, Fallen, Snatch. We decided it was more fun playing with computers than endlessly scanning our pussies and so Velvet Downunder morphed into VNS Matrix. Tagging ourselves the virus of the new world disorder and fuelled by red wine and g-slime (which could only be replenished by engaging frequently in pleasurable distractions).

"The room. Pale blossom branded by a dawn which always comes too early. It is empty apart from a bed. Three candles illuminate the space. Outside the cars become the steady roll of a wave which never quite breaks, under stars which hold their promise of morning for hours."

"It is in this room that I utter a thousand promises of tender infamies. It is here that I captivate the minds of strangers who readily surrender to the capricious will of the Mistress of Detestable Pleasures. Only the serious may play my games."

"I enter the computer, I connect, I am. It's like breathing. But shared with a million million others. I die again and again, and each time I remake myself. With a multiple of incandescent morphs one is never alone."

A: We wrote the Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century, had it translated into Japanese and Spanish (and later into French, Finnish, Russian, Italian, Dutch) and began infiltrating cracks in the patriarchy, twisting the tender tentacles of power of Big Daddy Mainframe to create a vision of the future which was technotankgirltopian. We were ignorant of the work of Sadie Plant in the UK who was also constructing a notion of cyberfeminism and when we finally heard of her work we started pumping out new virii into the mainstream Australian media, describing this new wave of brave new girls, machine queens and their perverse pleasures. Recombinants ruled, we made art with our cunts, we blew up company computers, made a vat grown billboard, one thing led to another, hypothetical games and MOOs, and now, our last project, the production of a real computer game (how dull!) Bad Code. But all this seems like old history, and it's time for cyberfeminism/s to evolve....I've just seen the new Star Trek movie...I liked the sleazy borg bitch but it's a tad disheatening to see that the cyberfeminist virii had not penetrated the Picard pixels...can't win all wars I guess.

slipping through screens

into that dangerous realm

deep doll hunger

code lust

juicy hole

thick brown stem

kiss my code

lick it better

unravel me

Q: Cyberfeminism/s is in a state of mutation for you and your work--where are the lines of flight going? Or is it to early to tell where the next borgbitch virii will come from and how it will morph?

A: Cyberfeminism/s has become the field from which i work, from which multiple lines of flight errupt anarchically, generating dialogues, relations, conceptual and physical objects. This field itself is infected by other philosophical/poetic/ political contaminants ...making it hyper fertile mudpit to play in through this cross infection cyberfeminism mutates into many .. increasingly impossible to police and control .. and not only the future but its present is unnamed.

Q: Is your refolding of gashgirl into the floating world of doll yoko a coming attraction of things to cum?

A: i like doll a lot .. she's cool, and to me makes gash look very late 80s. Playing with the construct of cyberbitch from hell was fun, but there's a limit to how many times one can snarl 'suck my code' without yawning. doll was born in a deep muddy pond in the mountains of kyoto where women used to drown their infant daughters--so she is coded with a particular sadness and multiplicity of identities/voices which were silenced too young, before these cunts could present a danger to society. From such a dark starter the lines of flight are many and potent. She's a ghostgirl with a deep doll hunger for the impossible.

doll yoko says .. i'd rather be a ghost than a cgi_script

doll yoko says .. all women are ghosts and should rightly be feared

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ricardo dominguez

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